I was checking out the Plain Truth site today to see what they had up. Since the PT is no longer a COG publication it has lots of different writers and articles by nationally syndicated writers.
There was an article in the Sumner 2012 issue on "
Just War or Just Peace?"
Just wars were talked about a lot in Armstrongism, and still is to this day. It is also not an exclusive Armstrongite phrase either. Evangelicals and others love to throw it around too.
Just wars are the attempt to justify war ethically...
Just War Theory is an idea and tradition developed by philosophers (e.g. Aristotle and
Cicero) and theologians (e.g. Augustine and Hugo Grotius) in an effort to establish a
platform of ethics for war and peace. Just War Theory seeks to define ethical parameters
of justice in the context of war—the justice of resorting to war (jus ad bellum), just
conduct during war (jus in bellum), and justice in the peace agreements which terminate a
war (jus post bellum).
Armstrongism and a lot of Christianity use
just war to gloss over the killing on tribes and nations in the Bible stories. If God can do it, why can't we! It is used by nations today to justify the invasion of other countries and more.
The article goes into detail about what the American military did to Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In March 1945, Tokyo, Japan, a city roughly the size of New York, is firebombed by American bombers. Fifty-one percent of the city is destroyed and 100,000 civilians are killed in a single night, burned to death. Fifty square miles of the city is burned to the ground.
Fifty to ninety percent of the people are killed by incendiary bombs in 67 cities before Hiroshima and Nagasaki are finally eradicated by nuclear bombs. Nothing about this resembles the proportionality that just war theorists require. Civilian deaths were not collateral to the bombing of military targets, but directly the object of the attacks. By the Geneva Conventions, it is a crime against humanity to bomb unarmed civilians.
General Curtis Lamay, who ordered the firebombing of civilian targets and ultimately the nuclear attack, said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
Robert MacNamara, America’s Secretary of Defence under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, served under LaMay during the war against Japan. He confessed, “We were behaving as war criminals.
What makes it immoral if you lose and moral if you win?”
The author of the article uses a chart that shows the Japanese City fire bombed and its equivalent in size American city and the percentage of people killed.
2. If just war ethics have indeed been set aside, then wars in the name of any God and draped in any flag are a sham. By what blasphemy can the facts of this chart be attributed in any way to biblical justice or the Christian God? How can any nation simultaneously create and implement nuclear missiles, cluster bombs, or chemical weapons and claim to have the blessing of either Christ, Yahweh, or Allah? Across the board, such pursuits should be identified with no one but the Beast and his false prophets (those who lay hands of blessing on acts of destruction).
3. Modern warfare is neither “just” nor “holy,” even by the formal definitions of our theorists. Our bizarre justifications are only matched by our ability to see evil in “the other” and excuse ourselves
of the same evils by using different labels. Let those without WOMDs or a history of using them on civilians cast the first stone. As I said, the firebombing of Japan was a true holocaust…a sacrifice by fire
of victims who we knew were the bad guys. War makes bad guys of us all.
Read the article and then tell us what you think.
